It's a good time to be between coaches. Alas, the Hawks are between everything. Rudy Tomjanovich and Larry Brown and Paul Silas and Jeff Van Gundy and now even Rick Carlisle are on the prowl, but the Hawks are too unsettled to know which jobs should be filled in what order. It is, sad to say, the story of this franchise's life.

The Hawks never get lucky. They never fall into anything good. Every risk -- the tandem of Moses Malone and Reggie Theus, the trade of Dominique Wilkins for Danny Manning, the Isaiah Rider experiment, the Lon Kruger trial balloon -- goes sour. When they make the playoffs, they go nowhere. When they don't, they whiff in the lottery.

With LeBron James and Carmelo Anthony available, this was a good year to have a pingpong ball in the draft hopper. The Hawks had the eighth-best chance of landing the No. 1 pick and the ascendant James, and they wound up with No. 8, which meant they ended up with nothing. Because the Hawks weren't among the top three, they had to cede the choice to Milwaukee, which shipped Glenn Robinson here last summer and has no cause for regret.

The Hawks have made six lottery picks for themselves, and the list is mostly grim reading: Jon Koncak, Rumeal Robinson, Stacey Augmon, Adam Keefe, Jason Terry, DerMarr Johnson. They traded the No. 3 pick in the 2001 draft (Pau Gasol, the subsequent rookie of the year) for Shareef Abdur-Rahim. They would have held the eighth pick last season -- at No. 8, Amare Stoudemire and Caron Butler were still available -- but they'd sent it to the Clippers in the Lorenzen Wright deal. You'd think that, just once, Dame Fortune would take pity on this team and hand it a windfall the size of Yao Ming, but no. The Braves can dismantle their pitching staff and suffer no consequences in the standings, but the Hawks can't catch a break. Their timing is always lousy, a failing never more pronounced than now.